Integration Issues

In order to make hypertext systems fully open and integrated, the following issues must be addressed: interoperability, programmability, node and link typing, distributed linking, concurrency control for multi-user access in a shared environment, maintaining public and private links, operating systems support, networking, bridge laws, linking protocols, multimedia support, user interface consistency, and version control. Most of these requirements can be addressed using object-oriented techniques.

• Interoperability can be achieved by employing some of the many layered, platform-independent architectures, models or engines, and frameworks that have been proposed and developed by researchers in an effort to make hypertext systems more generic and integrated into the desktop environment. In order to make hypertext systems fully portable, existing document standards such as ODA and SGML must be extended to support unstructured documents and linking. International standards such as HyTime and MHEG are emerging to support hypertext functionality and multimedia information in applications. The applications of these standards to operational and proposed systems must be investigated. A few commercial products such as FrameBuilder from Frame Corporation, DynaText from Electronic Book Technologies, and PassageWays from Passage Systems provide SGML-based hypertext authoring tools.^{[ComSymHT93, 1993]}
  
  
• Programmability can be achieved by providing application development toolkits for adding hypertext functionality to existing systems.
  
  
• The concept of concurrency control is quite different in a multi-user collaborative environment as opposed to a multi-user environment. Such environments require complex concurrency control mechanisms such as event notification, fine-grained notification, shared locking, fine-grained locking, user-controlled locking, and persistent collaboration information.^{[Wiil & Leggett, 1993]} The requirements suggested by these researchers must be applied to collaborative hypertext systems.
  
  
• Linking protocols such as Sun's Link Service, Intermedia's Link Server, Microcosm Link Engine have been developed. Some of these are closed systems. They work with only certain applications on certain hardware platforms/operating systems. The commercial use of these protocols must be explored further.
  
  
• Most linking protocols exist as layers above the operating system. Making the link service an integral part of the operating system must be investigated. Such an attempt is being made as part of the Macintosh implementation of the Microcosm Link Engine (called Macrocosm).^{[Lewis, 1993]}
  
  
• Only when hypertext functionality becomes an integral part of our computing environment will knowledge workers accept and incorporate hypertext into their daily work process.